The Judge Is Reversed (6 page)

“You look like a prayer meeting,” Gebhardt said, with some pleasure. “Or a crap game.”

“Push,” Bill said, over the chair, to Mullins. Mullins pushed.

“WOW—OW!” Amantha said, and the moving chair exposed her. She tried to back under.

“Grab her!”
Gebhardt shouted and started forward. And Mullins grabbed the little café-au-lait cat, with brown ears and face and legs, and long brown tail. He held her dangling.

“Desk,” Gebhardt said. “Hold her down.”

Mullins looked around somewhat wildly, Amantha dangling. He held the cat out toward Pam.

“Desk!”
Gebhardt said. “How many times—”

Mullins put the little cat down on the desk top.

“Push her down hard,” Gebhardt said. “Front end. Good and hard. They're tougher than they look.”

“Good God,” Mullins said, but he pressed down on the little cat's shoulders. She glared up at him from wide blue eyes.

“Don't let go until I say,” Gebhardt said, and was around the cat. He rubbed her flank with a dab of cotton which he had carried with the syringe. He pushed the needle in, and the little cat was a spring of rage under Mullins's big hands. She twisted. She screamed. Gebhardt pressed the plunger. Amantha was a tortured cat. She mentioned it.

“Let her go!”
Gebhardt said, loudly.
“Quick, man!”

Mullins yanked his hands up.

Amantha was a released spring. She paused only long enough—and it did not seem she really paused at all—to rake Mullins's right thumb with a needle tooth. She then went back under the sofa.

“Good,” Gebhardt said. “Not much trouble after all. Get you, sergeant?”

Mullins shook blood from his hand. Not much blood, to be sure. But blood. He glared at Gebhardt.

“Have to move fast,” Gebhardt said. “Even when they're getting along, as she is, they're pretty quick. Fortunately, she's a sweet-tempered little thing. Aren't you, Amantha?”

The cat answered from under the sofa. She said, “mrr—ough,” but with no special violence.

“Knows it's over for the day,” Gebhardt said. “Well, got to be getting along. I'd put a little iodine on that, sergeant.” He did not, it occurred to Pam, speak in tones of much sympathy. “Never got a really bad infection myself, but now and then—As I said, you've got to be firm with them. Firm and fast.”

He nodded, confirming his own statement. He went out of the room again.

Mullins prepared to speak.

“As a matter of fact, sergeant,” Pam North said, “you didn't need us, you know. All you had to do was to look at Gebby's hands. Bandages. Anybody could tell he's a cat vet.” She looked at Mullins and shook her head. “A matter of deduction,” Pam said. “Obvious, my dear sergeant.”

For a moment the glare remained in the eyes of Sergeant Aloysius Mullins. They waited. The glare faded and Mullins slowly, widely, began to grin. Mullins's face is large, but the grin fitted it.

“O.K.,” Mullins said. “O.K. the bunch of you.”

5

They waited in their apartment for Captain William Weigand, Sergeant Aloysius Mullins. They had been told to go there; told to wait there. If they didn't mind. While spadework was done. “We'll be along,” Bill told them. “To hear how come you knew Blanchard was going to be killed.”

“If we didn't mind indeed,” Pam said to Jerry, as they waited. They had waited first with sandwiches, in lieu of lunch. They waited then, for some time, with conversation—with some attempt to determine what, if anything, they did have to tell the men from homicide they had known so long.

“A woman with fringe,” Pam said. “An injured tennis player. A man who's fanatic about vivisection. You'd have thought he was killing Amantha, wouldn't you? And really it's no more than a prick.”

“Tell them that,” Jerry said. “I must say, however, Amantha doesn't seem to need much rejuvenating.”

“Poor Mullins,” Pam said, and reverted. She said that it didn't, did it, seem like so much when you listed it. A woman with fringe, a blond youth with a temper, a middle-aged man with a fixation.

“Perhaps,” Pam said, “I went too far. We didn't know he was going to be killed. Only that he was enemy-prone. And, of course, inclined to sit in judgment.”

They didn't, Jerry agreed, actually know much about the late John Blanchard. Bill would know more.

“We've got stamps to give,” Pam said and, when Jerry raised eyebrows, added, “Trading.”

“On the other hand,” Jerry said, “we could sit this one out.”

“We always could have,” Pam said. “Except the very first one. We never have. Every time, it seemed there were circumstances. Speaking of time, isn't it about?”

Jerry looked at his watch. It was ten minutes past six.

“It is indeed,” Jerry said, and got up, and moved quickly—moved to the kitchen and the refrigerator, to the bar in the living room. Ice made pleasant sounds in a shaker. “We're creatures of habit,” Pam said, accepting. “How nice for us.”

One of their habits is to drink slowly. They had not finished their first, not quite finished, when the doorbell rang at a few minutes before seven. Bill came in and Mullins followed him, and Bill said, “Phew!” Jerry mixed again, this time three in the shaker, a solitary old-fashioned. (Without fruit salad; Mullins was being reformed.) Mullins had a small bandage on his right thumb.

“Right,” Bill Weigand said, after a sip. “Now—give.”

They gave—gave a woman in fringe at a cat show, the identification of Blanchard by a woman who ran what Pam called a cat store; gave an indignant tennis player.

“Which last,” Jerry said, “was in the papers. Except, not the affair in the garden bar.”

“This Mears,” Bill said. “He was really sore? All-out sore? About calls in a tennis match?”

Mullins emphasized scepticism by shaking his head slowly.

Apparently there was an angle, Jerry said—an angle which included money. As Al Laney had implied—a question of an offer for a professional tour. Whether Doug Mears needed money—Jerry shrugged. He said that a good many of them did; that amateur tennis, although it would be absurd to contend that it did not pay—to a degree by subterfuge—had in recent years become an apprenticeship to a profession. About Mears—He shrugged again.

“Also,” Pam said, “the girl's in it somehow. A pretty girl with red hair. Not dyed, I don't think. At the table with Mr. Blanchard and Mr. Mears—looked at her.”

This was amplified. Bill Weigand said, “Ummm.”

“We haven't got too much on Blanchard yet,” he said. “He was fifty-seven, according to
Who's Who
. A widower. Childless, apparently. An attorney by profession, but not in active practice for a long time. If any time. Didn't need to be, I gather, having enough of what it takes.”

Blanchard had been a widower for some fifteen years, living alone, with two servants, in the old-fashioned apartment which had been his parents'. It had been a “good” address those many years ago; it no longer was; it was evident that Blanchard had not minded.

“Perhaps,” Pam said, “he felt that his living there
made
it a good address.” They regarded her. “He looked like that,” Pam said.

Admittedly, this was possible. It did not, at the moment, seem to have much importance. Except that it might, if Pam was right, give them some measure of the dead man. It is always desirable to measure the violently dead; it is seldom easy. Measurement of the late John Blanchard was proceeding slowly. Partly, this was due to the fact that the day was Sunday, when it is difficult to find out anything about anything. People who might have answers to questions which might be asked are, generally, inaccessible. Offices are closed; bank vaults, including those which shelter safe-deposit boxes, are sealed inexorably by time as well as by heavy locks.

The apartment had, so far, yielded only bits and pieces.

When Dr. Oscar Gebhardt had found Blanchard, the attorney—and judge of cats and the fall of white balls on the worn grass of tennis courts—had been dying alone in his apartment. If one did not count three cats. He might have been struck down minutes before Gebhardt found him or, conceivably, two hours before. He had been struck in the back of the head with a heavy object, a blunt object; an object with a dull point.

“They say,” Bill told the Norths, “that the wound was the sort that might have been made if he'd been knocked backward against the corner of a desk. Or of a desk drawer. Only—he would have had to hit it very violently. Been thrown against it. And there are no other marks of violence on the body. Gebhardt was right, incidentally, in thinking there was nothing anybody could have done by the time he got there. Whole back of the skull bashed in. Brain laceration.”

Blanchard had been dressed in slacks and jacket and rubber-soled suède shoes. He had made himself coffee that morning; a little coffee remained in a Chemex and it was still faintly warm when the police arrived. Tasted, it had seemed reasonably fresh. He had fed the cats, who, apparently, ate from a single dish. He had fed them chopped beef, jarred for small children; a little remained and had not dried out. Precisely when he had done these things there was no way of determining.

The two servants Gebhardt had mentioned were a man and wife; two of the rooms of the apartment had been their bedroom and sitting room; one of the baths their bath. The man was quite tall and thin; the woman short and decidedly plump. The clothes in their closet revealed this. There was nothing to indicate where they had gone. They were Mr. and Mrs. Robert Sandys, or had received mail so addressed, and dropped envelopes into a wastepaper basket. There was nothing in their rooms to indicate that they did not intend to return.

Blanchard had owned two cars—a 1957 Buick sedan; a later model Cadillac. The Cadillac was in a garage three blocks away; the Buick was not. Sandys had picked it up Saturday morning and it had not been returned.

The most likely thing was that Blanchard had given the Sandyses the weekend off, and the use of the Buick to enjoy it in. They might be anywhere.

“Looking at leaves,” Pam said. “Only it will be early unless they go way up.”

Looking at, or for, leaves was a possibility. There were dozens of other possibilities. If the Sandyses did not return within reasonable time—that evening would seem a reasonable time—they would be looked for. They would be able to help the police in the measuring of a man killed.

In the apartment in the old building, John Blanchard had been, in a way, more isolated than if he had lived in a big country house, miles from anywhere, deep in many acres. Such houses are approached by car; cars are seen, perhaps speculated about.

At any time, but particularly on a Sunday morning, anyone might turn off the sidewalk into the apartment house Blanchard had lived in and been unnoticed, unremarked. After noon on weekdays, but only after three in the afternoon on Sundays, the small elevators which served the two wings of the building were attended; at other hours they were passenger-operated.

Anyone could walk across an empty lobby, as Gebhardt said he had walked, and gone into an elevator and pressed a proper button and been seen by nobody. From the small lobby on the sixth floor, two doors opened—one to Blanchard's apartment and the other to a presumably similar apartment occupied by people named Butler. The Butlers had left the previous Friday on a cruise.

Whoever had killed Blanchard had been let in by Blanchard. Or had had a key of his own. Or her own.

Pam North raised eyebrows at the last qualification.

“Right,” Bill said. “Depending on what was used, of course. And on the strength of the lady. But at the spot hit the skull isn't very—resistant. Blanchard's wasn't, anyway.”

They hadn't, Jerry gathered, found what had been used. He assumed the theory wasn't that Blanchard had been hit in the back of the head with a desk? With the corner of a desk?

“Jerry!” Pam said. “Nobody could hit anybody with a desk. A table, perhaps, but—” She stopped, abruptly. “Bill!” she said. “Scratching post?”

Bill Weigand blinked for a moment. But then he stopped blinking and his eyes narrowed thoughtfully. He said, “Hmmmm.”

“You may well,” Pam said. “Wait.”

She went out of the living room and shortly, from some distance, there was a sound of banging. “We put it out of sight,” Jerry said. “Because—well, just because.”

“I know,” Bill said. “Because she—”

“Both of us,” Jerry said.

Pam came back, with her hands full. “I wish,” she said, “you'd find someplace else to put our rackets. Both of them fell off and one came down on my toe and—” She stopped. “Anyway,” she said, and waved what her hands were full of—waved it a little truculently, but obviously in demonstration.

It was a square post, about three feet long, set into a broad square base of polished wood. The post was covered with a carpet-like material, in this instance somewhat tattered. It was most tattered at the height a medium-sized cat might reach when the feline urge to scratch came upon him.

Pam raised the post above her head and held it so that, if brought down violently—on, for example, another head—the corner of the squared base would strike first. She held it so for some seconds. She said, “Well? He had one?”

Bill Weigand nodded his head. He said, “Right, Pam.”

Sergeant Mullins got up and took the cat-scratching post from Pam and hefted it and examined the joint between post and base. He put it down and said, “Might break off, maybe. But, on the other hand, maybe not. He had three of urn. One for each cat, I guess.” He looked at Weigand. “Maybe?” he said.

“Right,” Bill said. “By all means, Mullins.”

Mullins went to the telephone in the living room. He dialed and waited.

He said, “Nate?” and then, “Know what a scratching post looks like?” He waited again, momentarily. “That's it,” he said. “For cats. There's three of them up there and it looks like it could be—”